Optimize Code Delivery Pipelines with DevOps Automation

By Flux7 Labs

March 8, 2018

Many developers steeped in the world of agile startups view continuous delivery (CD) pipelines as an accepted standard requirement for software development. Yet many companies, particularly large enterprises with traditional infrastructure, still struggle to make this approach a standard part of their development process. Whether you are an enterprise looking to make CD pipelines a standard project element to increase agility and speed time to market, or if you are looking to simply implement code delivery pipeline best practices, Flux7 CEO, Dr. Aater Suleman, has written a paper that illustrates how to deliver business value through DevOps-based automation that grows developer output and strategic contributions. Download it here or read on for highlights from his piece.

DevOps-based automated code delivery drives value as it promotes innovation, enables the delivery of quality software and speeds time to market. Moreover, it can reduce the friction between development and IT operations, reducing overall system costs. Dr. Suleman indicates that organizations can achieve these benefits via efficient code delivery pipelines that use DevOps automation coupled with cloud infrastructure.

With continuous delivery, developers use automation to accelerate the software delivery process. To optimize this development model, companies need to automate their build, integration and testing processes as well as provisioning and retiring infrastructure components. Organizations will need to leverage infrastructure resources (virtual machines, storage devices and networking assets) to automate the build, integration, and testing the code under development

Flux7 Approach to Optimized Pipelines

Optimized development environments have several commonalities, according to Dr. Suleman. In the code phase, they commit code often and have a clear, unambiguous process for committing code and making changes to code. When it comes to testing, it is easy to run a test locally. And, promoting code from development to QA is straightforward as any code pushed by a developer automatically becomes ready for QA.

QA in turn is streamlined and commits that fail QA are rejected automatically. Commits that pass are promoted to production in a one-click process; there’s no ambiguity in which code has gone through QA and is ready for production. Last, deployment to production is fully automated. And, deployment does not lead to system or application downtime.

Monitoring and alerts are implemented so that you (and not your customers) are the first to know about errors. In production, code is monitored for off-specification system behavior and components that don’t function properly.

Download the white paper today, which includes two case studies, to learn more about the steps to take to optimize your code delivery pipeline and accelerate your innovation with quality code through DevOps automation.